Sleep-Deprived, but Into the Next Round

As the players grew red in the face and called for the trainers on a muggy Tuesday at the United States Open, the thought of a night match sounded like relief.

Imagine the relative cool of a late-summer evening; floodlights instead of sunlight, ice in the bigwigs’ drinks instead of ice bags on the changeover.

But there is a definite dark side to night tennis at Flushing Meadows, where it too often threatens to become morning tennis.

So it went on a Monday that gradually gave way to Tuesday as Kei Nishikori and Milos Raonic played a generation-next contrast in styles, a match that concluded with the counterpunching Nishikori rallying to beat the huge-serving Raonic, 4-6, 7-6 (4), 6-7 (6), 7-5, 6-4.

It was 2:26 a.m. and the surprise to the uninitiated was that more than a thousand people were still in the stands in Arthur Ashe Stadium, most of them awake and neither relatives nor employees of either player.